REBECCA- Character Quotes

I might have been the burglar

and he the master of the house

The mistress of the house was

hiding behind the door

He knew I was her lover;

he was jealous, madly jealous

You’re like a little trade union

here at Manderley, aren’t you?

You didn’t have much success with Rebecca, did you, Crawley?

That garden path wasn’t long enough, eh?

You think i’m the big,bad wolf, don’t you? he said

but I’m not, you know. I’m perfectly ordinary

that’s the sort of death Rebeca would choose

she’d go out like she lived, fighting

All married men with lovely wives are jealous, aren't they

and some of ‘em just can’t help playing othello

A lovely woman isn’t like a motot tyre, she doesn’t wear out

The more you use her the better she goes

I’m a bit of a socialist in my way, you know and

I can’t think why fellows cant share their women instead of killing them

There he is, there’s your murdered for you, Mr Maximilian de Winter….

He’d look well hanging wouldn’t he

black figure standing out alone, individual and apart,

and for all her silence I knew her eye to be upon me

hers was limp and heavy, deathly cold,

and it lay in mine like a lifeless thing

whose prominent cheek-bones and great, hollow, eyes gave her a

skull’s face, parchment-white, set on a. skeleton’s frame

spoken in a voice as cold and lifeless

as her her hands had been

she was like a shadow standing there, watching me,

appraising me with hollow eyes, set in that dead skull’s face

the angry colour flooded

her dead white face.

There’s not much for you to live for is there?

Why don’t you jump now and have done with it?

She was not in love with anyone.

She despised all men. She was above all that.

I’ve known her come back and sit upstairs in her bed

and rock with laughter at the lot of you

She had a right to amuse herself, hadn’t she?

Love-making was a game with her, only a game

Did not you know? she had said

She simply adored Rebecca

I shall never forget the expression on her face.

Triumphant, gloating, excited in a strange unhealthy way

Would you like to touch it again? …

I haven’t washed it since she wore it for the last time

We have no secrets

now from one another

Its Max de Winter, she said ‘the man who owns Manderley’

You’ve heard of it, of course. he looks ill, doesn’t he? They say he can’t get over his wife’s death…

The last supreme bluff. she wanted me to kill her.

She foresaw the whole thing. That’s why she laughed.

Maxim could lean over a cottage gate in the evenings, smoking a pipe,

proud of a very tall hollyhock he had grown himself

No, Im asking you to marry me

you little fool

instead of being companion to Mrs Van Hopper you become mine,

and your duties will be almost exactly the same

I saw how thin his face was, how lined and drawn.

And there were great shadows beneath his eyes.

my darling/

my little love

The thing i’ve dreamt about, day after day, night after night

We’re not meant for happiness, you and I

My good child, what am I supposed to

excuse myself about?

It’s gone forever, that funny, young lost look that I loved….

Its gone, in twenty-four hours. You are so much older…

blue, monotonous, like spectators

lined up in a street to watch us pass

I never dress up

said Maxim

you look like

a little criminal

Men are simpler than you imagine, my sweet child. But what goes on in the

twisted tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone

A husband is not so

very different to a father after all

He stared at me at first like a

puzzled child and then he held out his arms

I held him and comforted him

as though he were Jasper

I was sitting in Rebecca’s chair, I was

leaning against Rebecc’a cushion

He still thought about Rebecca.

He would never love me because of Rebecca

Rebecca, always Rebecca.

I should never be rid of Rebecca

But Rebecca would never grow old. Rebecca

would always be the same. And her I could not fight. She was too strong for me.

But it was’nt a man

it wasn’t a woman. The sea got her

She cracked her whip over his head and down he

came, head over heels, cursing and laughing

She ought to have been born a boy,

I often told her that.

She’s still mistress here,

even if she’s dead

It’s you who ought to be dead,

not Mrs de Winter

Its the body of some unknown woman, unclaimed

belonging nowhere

Rebecca , whom they described as

beautiful, talented, loved by all

the same as the crushed white petals of the azaleas

in the Happy Valley

Rebecca stood out black and strong, the tall

sloping R dwarfing the other letters

This new ones not like our

Mrs de Winter, she’s different altogether

I could not help it if I felt like a guest in manderley, my home,

walking where she had trodden, resting where she had lain

max, to watch my son grow bigger by day by day

and to know that when you died, all this would be his?

She is comparing me to Rebecca;

and as sharp as a sword the shadow came between us …

trailing in the wake of

Mrs Van Hopper like a shy uneasy colt

I was writing letters in the morning-room. I was sending out invittaions:

I wrote them all myself with a thick black pen

The face in the glass stared

back at me and laughed

I felt exactly as though it were

to be a final parting and I should never see him again

I wanted to be a traveller on the road,

a bride in love with her husband

there was nothing quite so shaming, so

degrading as a marriage that had failed

The fact that I loved him in a sick, hurt, desperate

way, like a child or a dog, did not matter.

There was something

degrading in the fact that Maxim had hit Favell

It was Maxim. I could not see him

but I could hear his voice.

He did not love Rebecca,

he did not love Rebecca

I knew then I was no longer afraid of Rebecca. I did not hate her anymore.

Now that i knew her to have been evil and vicious and rotten.

I was not young any more. I was not shy. I was not afraid. I would fight for Maxim.

I would lie and perjure and swear,

He ran his fingers through my hair …

It was not like stroking Jasper anymore.

There were no shadows between us any more and when we were silent

it was because the silence came to us of our own asking

dressed as a

little dresden shepherdess

Put a ribbon in your hair

and be Alice in Wonderland

Would we never be together, he a man and I a woman, standing shoulder to shoulder, hand

in hand with no gulf between us? I did not want to be a child. I wanted to be his wife, his mother. I wanted to be old

Or Joan of Arc with your hair

Frank said shyly

Make the drummer

announce me

my curls were her curls, they stood

out from my face as hers did in the picture

She’s so different

from rebecca

we were walking through woods, maxim and I

and he was always just a little ahead of me

Of course I have heard before the

marriage is not a wild success

He never spoke to me. He never touched me.

We stood beside one another, the host and the hostess and we were not together

I’m glad it cannot happen twice

the fever of first love

rhododendrens …

blood red and luscious